Mar

Why is it never easy ?

Just once wouldn’t it be nice if everything in a technology enabled world actually went to plan ?

And Yes, I am my own worst enemy sometimes but I also do know what I’m doing.

So here’s the drill;

Receive new MBP and commence the process of adding the windows partitions I need, in this instance I have decided to go with Vista 64 and Windows 7 64 and skipping XP.

I am already a Macdrive and iPartition owner and I thought I had used them in combination before but I guess not in the combination I did this time.

Putting W7 aside for a moment as thats not particulalry relevant to this discussion.

Bootcamp drive, add another partition with iPartition and we’re ready to install.

All goes well but under Vista Macdrive is exhibiting some odd behavior, sometimes not seeing the internal drive although finding an external Lacie everytime.

Hmm, thats odd, Mediafour folks, what do you think might be happening here ?

(This is the worst enemy part) So do I wait for the answer ? Of course not, off I go and after finding various snippets and pieces of info out in the world I decide that it’s a disk issue and the best answer is to make the Lacie bootable so that I can use Disk Warrior to repair the internal HD.

So, bit of messing about but that all goes to plan and we boot from the Lacie, run Disk Warrior and now have a pristine internal drive (Ha ! thats what you think !)

Anyway, so now we’re booting fine, all working well on the internal drive, few odd macdrive issues still but all alrgely transparent to effective operation.

And then the support/ticket cycle with Mediafour (who really are quite responsive and helpful these days) results in the dreaded “Are you or did you use iPartition ?”

Umm, Yes, I reply, just knowing what the next response is going to say and sure enough, “Macdrive is not supported/compatible with 3rd party blah blah”

Great !! Oh, and to add to the pain, now the Lacie is completely invisible to Macdrive under Vista, charming !

Apparently, according to the Mediafour folks, if I start again (so to speak) and use Disk Utility to create the partitions then all will be well with the world from a macdrive perpsective but, as you can imagine, that involves a whole bunch of new moving and fiddling and, almost certainly, another external drive to use as a home for the data on the lacie whilst I rebuild it.

So I try and dance around the edges a little and shrink and extend the lacie partitions under Disk Utility hoping that will rewrite the partition map to some osx standard, no such luck I afraid, couldn’t be that easy could it !!

So here’s my beef;

Where’s the warning ? Why isn’t it proclaimed loudly somewhere on either the Mediafour site or the Coriolis site that there MAY be issues in using these tools in combination ?

And if OSX can see, read and boot from the partition map on the Lacie then why is Macdrive so damn fragile or particular ? (I’m sure there’s a valid reason but where/what is it ?)

So, anyway, I guess it’s now a Best Buy or New Egg decision as waiting for Mediafour or Coriolis clearly isn’t going to be a short term thing.

Tags: ipartition, macdrive